The NYPL Amazon panel: Views and reviews

From the live stream of New York Public Library’s “Amazon: Business as Usual?” event

“Concentration of power”

“The theme of this is really concentration of power and when do we start getting worried?”

It was WME literary agent Tina Bennett who suggested to LIVE From the NYPL’s curator Paul Holdengräber that the program have an evening’s conversation titled “Amazon: Business as Usual?” on the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) series. And as she moderated the panel Tuesday, the point that she and the group kept returning to was the development of a marketplace controlled, as Princeton-based panelist Danielle Allen put it, by one commercial entity.

My colleague Gayle Feldman has filed a report at The Bookseller on the event. She notes that Holdengräber said the discusssion was pulled together in about 10 days’ time. He hinted that there could be a follow-up event in the autumn.

By some 50 minutes into the evening, the exercise was notable for an inability or unwillingness of the powerful to speak for itself.